


full potential

by probablynotadalek



Category: DCU, Shazam! (2019)
Genre: Disability, Family, Freddy Centric, Gen, Growing as People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22944460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/probablynotadalek/pseuds/probablynotadalek
Summary: Freddy learns how to fly. It doesn’t fix anything.
Relationships: Billy Batson & Freddy Freeman, Billy Batson & Mary Bromfield & Eugene Choi & Darla Dudley & Freddy Freeman & Pedro Peña
Comments: 23
Kudos: 84





	full potential

**Author's Note:**

> As a disabled person, my least favorite thing in fiction is when they take away a character’s disability by giving them superpowers. It tells us that disabled people can’t be heroes without first becoming able-bodied. [ This article ](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristenlopez/2019/04/08/shazams-freddy-freeman-disabled-superheroes/#7740f7ee3434) by disabled critic Kristen Lopez puts it really nicely.
> 
> Small warning: There’s going to be a lot of talk about ableism, internalized and otherwise. Some characters are going to say and do problematic things. They’re not bad people, they just need some character development.

While the fight was still happening, Freddy’s feet never touched the ground. He could fly, and he was busy, and he never really learned how to. 

When it ended, he went back under the tent and found his crutch. He hovered a few inches above it. It was an odd, separate feeling, like he should be holding it. The crutch was in all of his memories. It was in his dreams, most nights. 

But Freddy had become big, and he’d become a superhero, and he had to pick up the crutch anyway. He took a deep breath and willed himself lower and lower, until his feet were just grazing the ground, and then he let gravity take over.

Pain shot up his leg, so far and hard and fast that he could feel it in his skull. He crumpled to the ground, wrapping around his leg like he could protect it from something. He held it off the ground, rested his head on his knee, and cried. 

He didn’t remember changing back into a teenager. He came back to himself when Mary -- just Mary, not the superhero occasionally known as -- when Mary wrapped her arms around him and half-dragged him into her lap. He buried his face in her shoulder and clutched her shirt with both hands. He sobbed and she said “I got you” and “I’m not going anywhere” and she didn’t say “you’re okay” or “what’s wrong”. 

Not that Freddy would know how to answer. The pain wasn’t new. Being disabled wasn’t new. He hadn’t really gotten his hopes up. The thing was, somewhere mixed in with the anger and the adrenaline wearing off was an overwhelming amount of relief, and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. 

So he cried. He cried until he didn’t have anything left in him anymore, and then he stayed where he was until he felt normal. When he looked up, his family was surrounding him. Mary was completely still and, he realized, probably uncomfortable. Darla and Eugene were asleep on top of Pedro, and Billy was leaning up against a pile of hay, watching them. 

No one said anything as they slowly made their way back home. It was late, and Victor and Rosa were waiting for them, and then everyone got caught up in explanations and confessions and it was even later when Freddy finally fell into bed. Billy crawled into the bunk above him.

“Hey Freddy,” he heard a few minutes later. “You awake?”

He was just starting to fall asleep, despite the fact that he was still wearing jeans, and he considered ignoring it. “Yeah,” he said instead. 

“You okay?”

Freddy didn’t really know how to answer that question. “Yeah. I’m fine.” 

“It’s just, when we found you I had no idea what to do, and you’ve helped me so much, and…” Billy trailed off. “I’m here for you, if you wanna talk about anything. 

“Can we,” Freddy took a deep breath. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Billy said, and Freddy heard him shift in the bed. “Yeah.”

***

The next morning, they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t really talk about anything. Rosa called the whole family out of school and Freddy remained determined not to get out of bed at all, if he could help it. 

When he heard his family talking and laughing downstairs, he pulled the blanket over his head and burrowed deeper. 

Later, there was a knock on his door and the telltale squeak of it opening. He pulled the blanket back a little to see Mary standing next to the bed with a plate and some silverware. “I brought you pancakes, if you’re ready to face the world.” She dropped the plate onto the foot of his bed and turned away. 

“I’m allowed to have bad days.” 

“I know.” Mary sighed as she pulled his desk chair over and sat down. “That came out meaner than I meant it to. I’m sorry.” She stayed silent and stared at him, then gestured to the food.

He sat up, grabbed the plate, and bit into a pancake. “There. You’ve completed your mission. You can go.”

“I’m not done bothering you.”

“Consider me thoroughly bothered.” He took another bite of the pancake and hoped it would make her leave. She didn’t, and it stuck in his throat on the way down.

“You wanna talk about yesterday?”

“Not really.” 

“Billy’s worried about you.”

“So?” 

“You should talk to him.”

“What do you want me to say?” Freddy snapped. “I’m disabled and I don’t know how not to be? I got scared because I didn’t know what kind of person I’d be if I could walk? I thought I’d shatter the illusion that I could help people?”

“You can.”

Freddy scoffed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t really disabled superheroes out there.”

“Seems like you’re the first.”

“Do you know how exhausting that sounds?” His voice cracked a little and he felt tears welling up against his will. He fell back in the bed with a huff and covered his eyes. “I can barely handle my own problems, Mary. I can’t… I can’t carry all that.”

Mary sat in silence while he took a few deep breaths. When he looked over, she nodded. “We’re gonna go find somewhere to test out our powers. Victor and Rosa are coming. I’m not gonna make you but,” she stood up and walked over to the door, “if you want, we’re leaving in half an hour.”

Freddy spent ten minutes watching his pancakes get cold before he decided to find pants. 

***

They went to the same warehouse Freddy and Billy had gone to when they first started experimenting with Billy’s powers. It was empty, still, save for a few empty boxes and the remnants of columns Billy had already destroyed. 

“This is gonna be awesome,” Darla said, smiling. 

Freddy sat down on a box, set his came next to him, and told himself that he wouldn’t touch the ground again until it was absolutely necessary.

Billy walked over to him, and the rest of them circled around them. “Hands in?” Billy asked. 

Freddy nodded, put his hand on top of Billy’s. “Ready?” Billy asked the group. They nodded.

“Shazam!”

It was fun, too. For a while he got to joke with his family and pretend that he was a hero. It was nice. Relaxing. Easy. 

Until it just… wasn’t. Something shifted and everything became too loud, too bright, too much. 

“Let’s do it again,” Big-Eugene said. 

Freddy sat down on the same box he’d started on. He’d learned enough last time; never change back without the thing that made him stand. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the anger in his chest and the stinging in his eyes. 

“Freddy?”

He opened his eyes. He was still… big. Super powered. Sitting on a box with his family, his normal-sized family, staring at him. 

“Turn back, Freddy.”

“I don’t want to.” He said quietly. 

“C’mon, Freddy, we gotta try it again.”

“I don’t,” he took a deep breath, “want to.”

“Freddy, we have to-”

“Everyone else has-”

“-experimenting-”

“-you just have-”

“-so we can-”

“Fine! Fine!” Freddy screamed. “Shazam!” And lighting struck and he wished it was more dramatic and it didn’t keep happening all the time and-

“It’s getting late,” Rosa said gently. “Time to head home.”

Freddy looked over at his crutch, sitting beside him. When he had leaned over to grab it and pushed himself up to stand, he found Billy standing over him, looking apologetic.

“All of us like our superhero forms better,” Billy said. 

Freddy shoved him, just a little, as he walked past. He almost fell over. So did Billy. He hated that it made him feel better. 

***

Later, on the way back from school, Billy walked at the back of their group with Freddy. He had to watch where he put his crutch down so he didn’t hit Billy’s feet. He didn’t want to talk.

When they finally got to the house, Billy touched Freddy on the shoulder. Freddy tried not to flinch, and stopped walking. He watched everyone else go inside. 

“I--” Billy started and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I wanted to talk.”

“Okay,” Freddy said. “So talk.”

“I was worried about you, so I talked to Mary and--”

Freddy groaned. “She shouldn’t have said anything, I was--”

“Not anything specific she just,” Billy took a deep breath. “She gave me some stuff to read about ableism and the way we internalize shit.”

“What, so you’re some sort of expert now? Here to lecture me about accepting myself?”

“I just understand what you’re going through.”

“You have no idea what I’m going through.”

“I don’t think I deserve these powers, either.” Billy said. “But I have ‘em. We have ‘em. That’s what matters.”

Freddy scoffed. “We’re not the same.”

Billy shrunk back a little. “I’m just trying to help.”

“Doing a great job,” Freddy said, rolling his eyes. 

Billy stopped, crossed his arms, and looked down at the ground. “The Wizard, when I met him, he said the magic would help me reach my full potential or whatever, and I thought I would-“

“So what, this is my ‘full potential’?”

“No, listen to me! I just-” Billy took a deep, shuddering breath. “Maybe… maybe you stayed this way because there was nothing to fix?”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Freddy spat. 

“C’mon, Freddy-“

Freddy stopped halfway to the door and turned back to Billy. “What do you expect me to do? Stop being broken?”

“You’re not broke-”

“Yes! I am!” Freddy threw up his free hand. “That’s what it means! That’s what this-“ he gestured to his crutch “-means.”

“You can't fix this! No one can! Not me, not the doctors, not even a fucking wizard! Stop trying.”

“Don’t give up on yourself!” Billy yelled.

“I’m not! That’s what you don’t understand!”

“Then tell me!”

“I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll never get it!” Freddy screamed. He took a shaky breath, and his next words were sharp and broken. “You can’t get it.”

Billy didn’t follow him inside. 

Mary was there when the door clicked shut, reading on the couch. Everyone else had disappeared into their rooms. Freddy felt something dark and cold and angry boil over in him.

“Why the fuck did you talk to Billy?”

“I talk to—? Oh.” Mary put her book down to look at him. “I thought it would help?”

“Well it didn’t.” He marched, fast as he could, to the stairs, trying to put as much feeling as possible into every thud-click of the crutch. “Stop trying to save me.”

“You said—“ Mary took a breath. “You said it was too much for you to carry.”

“I’m still the only one who can carry it.”

He started the long trek up the stairs, and Mary didn’t try to say anything else. He wasn’t sure why that made him so angry. 

***

Freddy didn’t talk to Billy for two days. 

They lived in the same room, which made it awkward and difficult. Freddy put a lot of work into it. The whole family noticed, and started giving him sideways glances or worse, space, and he almost fucking lost it. 

Rosa came into their room one night while Billy was still downstairs and Freddy was curled into bed, trying desperately to fall asleep. 

“I hear you fought with Billy.” 

“Yeah,” Freddy said. He didn’t move. 

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Rosa said. She patted the side of his bed. “Can I sit?”

He shrugged, and when she didn’t move he murmured, “Sure.”

The couch dipped just a little as she sat down. “This week has been a lot, hasn’t it?” He shrugged again. Rosa kept talking. “No one tells you when you apply to foster that you might end up raising superheroes.” 

“No one knew.” Freddy said.

“Superman’s parents did.”

“Superman doesn’t have parents.” 

“Everybody has parents.” Rosa said. “Or at least, people who care about them.” She took a deep breath. “We all care about you. BIlly too. Maybe especially him.” 

“I know.” He said quickly. “That’s not what’s wrong.”

The silence stretches for a long minute, but it’s warm and easy and it stings in Freddy’s eyes. “Can I touch your shoulder?” Rosa asked, soft.

Freddy thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, and realized as he said it how much he wanted that. 

“I guess no one thought to warn you how hard being a superhero is, either.” Rosa rubbed his shoulder. “That everything changes.”

Freddy sniffled and tried to keep his voice from breaking. “Seems like Superman’s whole family are jerks.”

Rosa laughed. “I doubt that.” She squeezed his shoulder and stood up. “Get some sleep, okay?:

Freddy nodded. When Billy came into the room that night, they still didn't talk, but everything felt less heavy. 

***

Since Billy had moved in and been placed in Freddy’s math class, they had been doing homework together. Freddy had forgotten how hard math was alone. 

He heard a knock at the door and a soft creak. “Can I come in?” Darla said, already peeking through the door. 

Freddy nodded and she ran into the room, taking a seat on his bed. 

“Whatcha doing?”

“Homework.” Freddy gestured to his paper. “What are you doing?”

“Talking to you,” Darla said, her feet swinging.

“Any reason why?”

“Billy thinks you’re mad at him.”

“That’s because I am mad at him.”

“Why?” She asked. Freddy made the mistake of looking over at her, staring up at him, seemingly on the verge of tears. 

“Because,” he sighed. “Because Billy said some stuff that hurt me, and I was already having a bad day.”

“He didn’t mean to.”

“Of course he didn’t mean to,” Freddy said before he’d even thought about it. “He just doesn’t understand why I was upset in the first place, and he thinks he does.”

“Maybe you should tell him.” 

“Yeah,” Freddy sighed. “It’s just hard.”

“Lots of things are hard,” Darla said. “Some things are worth it.”

Freddy nodded. “You’re right.” He smiled, soft and unsteady. “I’ll talk to him, okay? I promise. I just… I want to be mad for a little bit longer.”

“Promise you won’t be mad forever?”

“Promise.”

***

When Freddy finally worked up the courage to go downstairs, Billy was sitting at the dining room table surrounded by his math homework.

“Sending Darla was low.” Freddy said. 

Billy shrugged but didn’t look up. “Desperate times.”

After a moment of silence, Billy pushed out a seat next to him. Freddy sat down. 

“I didn’t-“

“I’m sorry-“ 

Freddy put his hands up. “You first.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed I knew anything about what you’re going through. I shouldn’t have pressured you to tell me anything.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“Can you just… promise to let me know if you need anything?”

“No.” Freddy shrugged. “I’ve been doing this, handling my disability, my whole life. I’ve been doing it alone.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know that,” Freddy sighed. “Logically, at least, I know that. But I’d have no idea how to ask, or what to even ask for.”

“Can you promise to try?”

“Can you promise not to push?”

Billy raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “No?”

“Okay.” Freddy nodded. “So let’s try… Can we agree to talk to each other? Be honest?”

“Not shut down?” Billy asked.

“Yeah.” Freddy nodded.

“Seems easy enough.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Billy took a deep breath. “Is it always this hard?”

Freddy sighed. “Pretty much.”

“I was talking about algebra.”

Freddy laughed. “Well yeah, that too. You stuck on number 5?”

“Yeah.”

So they worked, and they talked, and the last few lingering bits of tension started to leave. As they finished, the door opened and Mary entered with Eugene and Pedro.

“Oh good,” Mary said in lieu of a greeting. “You’re here. Any plans tomorrow?”

Billy and Freddy looked at each other. “No?”

“Perfect. Eugene signed us up for a talk show.”

***

“That’s…” Darla said from in front of a screen showing the audience, “that’s a lot of people.”

Freddy floated over to take a look. It was a big crowd, but his focus immediately snapped to the front row. There, right in front, was a little girl maybe Eugene’s age sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over her lap. She was wearing a shirt with a lighting bolt drawn on it in fabric markers and talking excitedly to the adult next to her. 

After a deep breath, Freddy turned and grabbed his crutch from where he left it propped against a chair. He extended it as far as it would go, which was still a little too short for his superhero body. 

“We’ll have to get a bigger one,” Billy said. “Gold, to match the color scheme.”

Freddy smiled at him and leaned against the crutch. Not ideal, but it would do for a little while. 

“You don’t have to,” Mary said.

“Yeah. I do.”

Later, they would write all about him in the papers. Later, they would speculate about how he got injured, even after he told them it was permanent. When he never lost the crutch, they would say that he was faking it for pity. They would say that the whole group of them, Justice League included, made his disability up to get diversity points. They would say that he was broken. They would say that he couldn’t be a hero. They would say that he was an inspiration to able-bodied people everywhere and he would struggle to explain why that, of all of them, hurt the most. 

Right then, though, he straightened his back as much as he could and walked into the room right behind Billy. He watched that little girl break into a smile when she saw him. He sat on the couch and he set the crutch in front of him, right between his legs, so no one could miss it.


End file.
